Carrie Molnar leans forward on the bleachers in the gym at West Holmes High School in Millersburg, Ohio. The manicured nails of her right hand dig into her cheek as she stares at the court, watching her daughter Natalie, a senior, play.
“Oh boy,” she says. “Oh boy. This is way too close.”
It’s early December, and the Knights of West Holmes County are playing the Hiland Hawks of Berlin, in East Holmes. They’re playing in a gym that West Holmes calls “The Dungeon.” Everyone here has already walked through a lobby that features a huge rock with an embedded sword — a replica of Excalibur — and through a doorway to the gym designed to look like it will deposit you into the type of room that holds people against their will. But once you get through, you’re in a 15-year-old gymnasium, a hotbed that seats 3,000 people.
Holmes County, Ohio, is home to the world’s largest Amish settlement, bigger even than that of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Columbus and Cleveland and Pittsburgh are all about the same distance away — too far. There are no movie theaters in the county. The nearest mall is 30 miles away in New Philadelphia and takes about 45 minutes to get there — if you’re driving a car, and this being Amish country, many people neither drive cars nor go to the movies.
It’s also home to just two high schools, two schools with the most storied girls’ basketball programs in the state.
Combine the two schools’ records (Hiland started playing girls’ basketball in 1968, West Holmes in 1975), and you get a remarkable 1,517 wins versus 466 losses, a .765 winning percentage over more than 40 years of basketball. Hiland hasn’t had a losing season since they went 10-11 in 1983-84. West Holmes last losing season was in 1998-99.
Ohio first held a girls’ basketball tournament in 1976 and since then, the two schools have combined for 21 trips to the Final Four of their division, 15 championship game appearances and eight state championships. Hiland won three state championships over the course of four years, from 2005-08. In the 1980s, West Holmes won three state championships, and, in the last four seasons, it’s made the finals three times and won once.
When these two teams play, the game brings out the type of crowd you don’t normally see at a high school girls’ basketball game. It’s the type of game that can fill The Dungeon.
Despite their difference in size — Hiland (Division IV) is one of the smaller schools in the state with just about 400 students in grades 7-12, while West Holmes (Division II), has double that in just grades 9-12 — they play each other just once every year. It’s a game nearly everyone in the county looks forward to. Over the previous 10 years, the series is tied at 5-5. Every year, the game is ridiculously tense. Every year, the game seemingly comes down to the final moments.
This game is shaping up to be no different. On the court, the defense is relentless. Both teams are having trouble making shots, because every shot is contested. Indeed, at the start neither team scored for the first several minutes in the game, until Hiland’s Kennedy Schlabach hit a three with a hand in her face. West Holmes responded as the first quarter grinded on, with two three-pointers by Kacie Leppla. But other shots just weren’t falling, and defenders, emboldened by the fact the referees were not blowing their whistles, got just a little closer to the offensive player they were matched up against.
In the stands, the fans are also tense. Hiland brought a large group, including about 50 students. Dressed all in white, they stood up at the tip and haven’t sat down since. They’ve been loud, and the West Holmes fans, dressed all in blue behind the team bench, have responded in kind.
“Oh boy,” Molnar says after a West Holmes player misses a free throw. “It’s much easier playing than watching.”
Holmes County is a place where half the farmers still till their land the way many of our ancestors did more than 100 years ago. It’s a county that has tiny villages — Charm, Walnut Creek, Winesburg — where you are more likely to see horse and buggies than cars. Here, in Holmes County, history is not just a thing to know to avoid repeating. History must be known, so it can be repeated. So it can be replicated, because what happened in the past is what was good and what was right.
And in that way, in a world where everything is so focused on the present and the future, on technology and ways we can always make things better, many of the people in Holmes County, even those who no longer strictly adhere to their Amish heritage, think otherwise.
“It’s different here,” says Mark Lonsinger of the Voice of Holmes County, a Millersburg-based website that offers all kinds of media content covering the county, including live-streams of West Holmes and Hiland basketball games, both boys and girls.
Lonsinger, who lives in Coshocton County, which is just to the south of Holmes, has been calling basketball games on the radio and the web since the late 1970s. And while none of the girls (or boys, for that matter) who play basketball in Holmes County are Amish — the Amish drop out of public schools by middle school, if they go to public school at all — daily life is different from other places.
“There’s a work ethic, there’s a family life, there’s a community life that is a throwback to the way it used to be in this country,” he says. “Is it all perfect? No. But I’m just saying it’s a different type of raising that the kids get, a different type of community structure than what exists in a lot of places today.”
Take, for instance, Dave Schlabach, the head coach of the Hiland Hawks. He graduated from Hiland in 1984. He’s now been coaching the girls’ team since the 1991-92 season. In all that time, he’s had two players who came from families where the parents were divorced. Two. Out of more than 100 players. The divorce rate in the United States ranges between 40 and 50 percent. For the parents of Schlabach’s players, it’s less than 2 percent.
“High school is challenging enough,” Schlabach says. “This place makes it a little easier, but that’s also why I have to build some toughness too.”
Lisa Patterson, the head coach at West Holmes, graduated from that school in 1988. She played on a championship team, and now coaches the daughters of the girls who were once teammates.
Both Schlabach and Patterson moved back to Holmes County after going to college because that’s what, ultimately, people from Holmes County generally do. Because they like it. And neither coach has ever thought about coaching another team anywhere else.
These are the things that make Holmes County a different kind of place. And maybe it’s that strict adherence to what has happened in the past, or maybe it’s something different. But Lonsinger thinks the past holds the key, especially for the basketball programs.
Indeed, anywhere you go in the county, there are people who are willing to talk about girls’ basketball like they talk about the Packers in Green Bay or the Red Sox in Boston. Invariably, the talk drifts to two coaches — one long-ago retired and moved away and the other dead far too young. Both men are still equally present in their communities. Both are spoken of in reverence. Both have taken on a mythical quality that almost makes one wonder if what they accomplished was real.
Make no mistake. It was real, and that’s one of the things that make these programs so storied. Because it’s the stories each community shares that brings them both together.
Carrie Molnar wasn’t always Carrie Molnar. She was once Carrie Wells. Carrie Molnar is just as tiny as Carrie Wells was, and she still has the same short hair that didn’t need to be put into a ponytail when she played. But now, instead of being down on the court — at the real “Dungeon,” which now is the gym at the middle school — she sits in the stands and remembers what it was like to play while she watches her daughter do what she did so long ago.
Carrie was a scrappy defensive specialist for West Holmes, the type of player who head coach Jack Van Reeth put on the opposing team’s point guard, so she could press all the way down the court, swatting away the ball from the opponent when she had just the tiniest opening.
It was the late fall of 1983, and Van Reeth was a new coach for the girls’ team, although he wasn’t new to West Holmes.
Van Reeth, also the assistant principal, had been coaching the West Holmes boys’ basketball team for nearly a decade. He was known for always dressing with a shirt and tie, for standing on the sidelines with his arms folded, and stomping his feet whenever he wasn’t happy, which was most of the time. He would shout at the referees and growl at his players.
In the 1960s, he’d even coached a team of boys from Dresden to a state title. Before the 1983-84 season, though, several people came to Van Reeth and asked him to switch over to the girls’ team.
One of those men was Herm Cline, the father of a girl named Lisa. Lisa was a junior, and, as far as everyone in Holmes County was concerned, about to change girls’ basketball.
Van Reeth said no.
“I’m too outgoing,” he told Herm Cline. But by outgoing, he didn’t mean welcoming. He meant just the opposite. He meant too loud, too hard on players, too tough, no nonsense. “They’ll never play for me,” he said.
“Let’s give it a try,” Herm told Van Reeth.
Van Reeth relented. He went to the girls on the team, which included Carrie Wells and Shane Ridenbaugh. Along with Lisa Cline, those three juniors would make up the core of the team — Cline the unstoppable scorer, Ridenbaugh the rugged rebounder and Wells the relentless, always-pesky defender.
“I’ve coached one way for 25 years,” Van Reeth told the girls. “I’m not going to change. You’re going to change.”
While this coaching philosophy might not cut it today, it worked back then. Each girl on an already good team got better. The Knights, coached by a man who coached girls like they were boys, went 28-0. In the championship game, a game played against conference rival Orrville (the home of Bobby Knight), Carrie was guarding the Red Riders’ point guard in overtime. In the final minute, she knocked the ball away and went diving for it, colliding with Lisa Cline who was also going after the loose ball. West Holmes got possession, Cline hit a layup and the Knights won by a single point, taking their first state championship.
They were just getting started.
The next season, the Knights of West Holmes would also go 28-0. In January 1985 against Akron Coventry, Lisa Cline scored 76 points, breaking the state record of 74, set three years before. That is still the record in Ohio, and nobody has really even come near it.
“Jack knew she was getting close,” Molnar says.
“Get her the ball,” Van Reeth told the girls in timeout huddles. “Hells bells, girls. Get her the ball!”
“We wanted her to get the record,” Molnar says, “because we wanted to be a part of that, too.”
With 56 straight wins, everyone thought the streak would end sometime the next season. Cline graduated as the third all-time leading scorer in Ohio and the record-holder for points in a season. She went on to Ohio State, where she played for four years and was named the Big Ten Freshman of the Year and later the Big Ten Player of the Year, leading the Buckeyes to three Big Ten championships. Ridenbaugh, the team’s leading rebounder, went to Ohio State where she was Lisa Cline’s roommate. Molnar graduated and played at Capital in Columbus.
They weren’t supposed to keep winning, and yet they kept winning. Even as the lineup changed, the approach and the results, did not. Another 28-0 record in the 1985-86 season. Another championship.
It wasn’t until the team’s 23rd game of the 1986-87 season that the streak came to an end, at the hands of Wellsville in a regional final game played at Muskingum College.
The team had won 108 straight games, still the record in Ohio. One girl who played on the third championship team, and who was also on the team that saw the streak end, was Lisa Straits. Lisa Straits would one day become head coach Lisa Patterson.
While there may be many ways in which Patterson is similar to the man who coached her, there is one difference: Unlike Van Reeth, Lisa isn’t overly concerned with getting lots of media attention. She doesn’t offer a lot of comments after games and she doesn’t make bold predictions about what her team will do next. Instead, she stands on the sideline, wearing West Holmes’ blue and red, pacing back and forth. She lets her team do all the talking, and it’s done a lot of that over the last few years.
Every November, anyone associated with basketball, girls or boys, in the East Holmes School District, gathers at the Der Dutchman Restaurant in Walnut Creek for the Perry Reese Jr. Tip-Off Banquet. The Der Dutchman serves honest to goodness Amish cooking — pan-fried chicken, mashed potatoes, noodles, green beans and pie — lots and lots of pie, apple, Dutch apple, blackberry, cherry, peach and more. It’s the type of cooking these families, or most of them anyway, have grown up on.
The banquet kicks off the high school basketball season for Hiland High School. All of the players and coaches, all of their parents and families, all of the boosters, they all gather in the banquet room to eat and visit.
But really, they gather to hear stories about Perry Reese Jr.
You may recognize Reese’s name. In 2001, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated wrote an epic story on how Reese, a black man, ended up in Holmes County, which at the time, was 99.9 percent white. In the eastern part of the county, that number was actually 100 percent, with most of that population being either Amish or Mennonite. Both religions come from the Protestant tradition known as Anabaptism and are often confused by outsiders. While both groups believe in simple living, Mennonites express that belief differently from Amish, who believe one must remove him or herself from contemporary society as much as possible.
Smith wrote the piece after Reese died in 2000 of a brain tumor, a death that devastated the community. Reese had such an impact on the county that Dave Schlabach estimates there are about 50 kids running around the area with Reese as a first or middle name.
Reese however, coached boys’ basketball. Smith’s story details the magical season of 1991-92, one that started with four boys being caught stealing from local businesses and ended with the team winning the state championship.
Schlabach took over the girls’ varsity team that same season.
“It really encouraged me to build a good program and to provide the opportunity for our kids to play in a state championship,” he says, “so they could see what it was all about.”
In 2001, one year after Reese’s death, Schlabach, whose brother Mark coaches the boys’ team at Hiland, started the annual banquet. The sole purpose of the banquet was to keep the memory of Reese alive in Eastern Holmes County, to tell the younger generations about the man who meant so much to them, not just on the basketball court, but off it as well.
“At least my players get to hear, once a year, stories about Coach Reese,” Schlabach says. “But it’s harder and harder. You tell the story, but the kids don’t feel the effect. I don’t know what’s going to happen as the years pass by.”
Over the years, Schlabach has brought in 10 former players to tell stories about Reese. He’s also brought in other people from outside the district, people nobody in Holmes County likely had ever heard of, and yet everyone who talks was deeply affected by Reese. Every year, there’s someone else coming from somewhere around the country — from North Carolina, Atlanta, Canton — to sit and tell stories about how Perry Reese Jr. changed their life.
Many of those stories center on how much Reese screamed at his players, but they’re told with a knowing laugh and a smile, as if it’s obvious now why everything Reese was doing was for their own good, even if it might not have been so clear then. And all the stories always end in a one-on-one talk with Reese, where hearts are opened and lessons are learned and love, real love, is felt. If it sounds like a cheesy sitcom, so be it. Everyone who experienced Reese is still moved as they retell the stories.
In 2011, one of the people doing the storytelling was Junior Raber, the star of the 1992 state champions. Raber was part of the magic of 1992 as much as Reese was. In the state semifinals, the Hawks were down by two with just seconds to go. Hiland had to bring the ball up the court, and Raber heaved a shot from half-court at the buzzer. It missed, but he was fouled. Raber knocked down all three free throws and sent Hiland to the championship game, which they won handily.
But at the Tip-Off banquet, he told all those younger players, boys and girls alike, not about the last-second shot, but about the time Coach Reese sent him to the locker room with three minutes left in a game because the coach didn’t like the way he was acting. Raber, after all, had kicked a chair after being taken out of the game. The chair went flying, and Reese looked at him and said “Get into the locker room.”
After the game, which Hiland won, Reese came storming into the locker room and went right after his star.
“He comes straight at me and laid into me,” Raber said.
Then, after everyone had showered up and was ready to leave, Reese approached Raber again.
“Junior, you’re riding home with me,” the coach said.
“It was a heart-to-heart that we had on that drive,” Raber said at the banquet. “He taught me a whole heck of a lot more than how to play basketball.”
That’s what Schlabach wants his girls to hear. He wants them to hear about Reese, and to know that he strives every single day to be as much like Reese as he can be.
He’s hard on his girls. He’ll yank them out of games if they’re not playing hard enough. He’ll take away their iPhones if he’s not happy with practice. He’ll yell and scream at them at halftime or after a game. He’ll make them practice at 11 p.m. after a really bad game, and then he’ll kick them out of practice if they’re still not working hard enough. He’ll do anything it takes to get the absolute most out of every girl on his team. These stories about Reese show the girls why their coach acts the way he does, lets them know that once you get beyond that bluster, there is someone who cares so incredibly much about the girls on that team that he would do anything for them. And then they will do anything for him.
Because that’s how Coach Reese was.
On the basketball court, it seems to have worked. Hiland has been to more Final Fours in Ohio than any other school in all divisions. They’ve won four state championships. Forty-three players from this tiny little school in the hills of Holmes County have gone on to play all levels of college basketball, including more than a few in Division I.
“I can probably do things here that I couldn’t do everywhere,” Schlabach says. “But our parents understand that we have 100 percent their best interest at heart. We’re not just trying to produce a good player or athlete, but great kids who are now business leaders in our community. Our kids need to be challenged and disciplined, and that buy-in really creates a strong bond. I doubt that happens at other schools.”
There’s another story about Reese that Schlabach likes to tell.
In 1994-95, Hiland was poised to have a great year. But then, as can often happen in sports, the Hawks’ two best guards both tore their ACLs about halfway through the season. The day Schlabach heard about the second tear, he was sitting in his office right before practice, moping.
Reese walked in and hit him upside the head.
“He reminded me that I still had 15 kids out there waiting on me to come to practice,” Schlabach says, “and how I walk out and approach that practice was going to determine the rest of our year.”
And, Schlabach says, “He reminded me that it wasn’t about me.”
“I finally figured it out,” he says now. “The year was never about you as the coach. It was always about your players and getting them to where they needed to be.”
Throughout the second quarter, Hiland runs a full-court press against the Knights. Natalie Molnar, Carrie’s daughter, finds herself guarding Kennedy Schlabach — Dave’s daughter — and attaches herself to the three-point shooter like her mom used to attach herself to point guards. West Holmes turns the ball over 10 times in the quarter. There are traveling calls and bad passes, all caused by how the Hawks fly to the ball. Hiland gets few points out of these turnovers, though, because every time they go to shoot, there is a hand, or multiple hands, in the shooter’s face.
At halftime of the West Holmes-Hiland game, the score looks like one from the 1980s. West Holmes leads 15-13. The Knights have two players who have already committed to playing college basketball. Hannah Clark, whose mother, Julie, played on the West Holmes team that made it to state in the mid-1990s, will be playing at Division I Northern Kentucky. Brittleigh Macaulay will be playing at Division II Ohio Dominican. Combined, they have two points in the game.
Fans mill about in the stands, talking. Molnar talks with Randy Martin. Martin, 51, has attended just about every West Holmes girls’ basketball game that’s been played, going back to when he was a student in the late-1970s and early-80s. Now he drives a semi, delivering lumber around the county. He graduated from West Holmes in 1981, and in the mid-80s, he was one of several men who Jack Van Reeth brought in to practice against the girls’ team.
Martin is a burly guy, and while he may not have been as burly just after graduating from high school, he certainly would have seemed burly to a teenage girl, at least on the basketball court.
“He said he wanted us to rough ‘em up a little,” Martin says of Van Reeth over the din of the pep band.
That’s the general consensus: John Coakley, the official scorekeeper for West Holmes, Van Reeth and Molnar, they all say those practices were designed to create toughness in the girls.
“Sometimes they complained,” Van Reeth says, “but they soon learned that they didn’t complain.”
If anybody had a right to complain, it may have been the men who were brought in to practice.
“Shane (Ridenbaugh) and Lisa Cline were so freakishly strong, they roughed us up,” Martin says.
Today, the West Holmes defense is roughing up the Hiland offense. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening on the other end of the court.
“Hannah is getting past that first defender and thinking she is open,” Martin says.
“They need to take advantage of their size,” Molnar says.
“They haven’t done that all season,” Martin says.
Basketball, more than any other sport, is one where excellent teamwork can beat pure athleticism. With ball movement and player movement and a keen understanding of what every single person on the floor will do in any given second, and with the energy and stamina to play harder than you’ve ever played before, a team of short girls from the relative middle of nowhere can beat any city or parochial team with super-athletic guards and towering post players in the paint.
In Holmes County, they get this idea of teamwork. And it starts with the Amish and Mennonite communities that call the county home.
During the last census, 42 percent of Holmes County residents were Amish. There are even predictions that the county could be the first in the country to be majority Amish, and that it could happen by 2030.
You only need to watch a barn-raising to understand how the Amish, and their less conservative brethren, the Mennonite, work as a team. Last May in Wayne County, the county directly to the north of Holmes, a fire destroyed the workshop of an Amish shed and swing-set builder.
Two days later, while the rubble was still smoldering, the local Amish community already had a new and bigger workshop framed. Less than two weeks after the fire, the building was done.
Or consider healthcare. The Amish do not buy health insurance. If someone gets sick, everyone in the community chips in to pay the bills.
How does this translate to basketball success? Well, on the East Holmes side of the county, where the vast majority of the Amish and Mennonite live, Schlabach says that half his players speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which means they have Amish relatives. Even Schlabach’s dad was born and raised Amish. In fact, there’s a huge population in Holmes County of former Amish, folks who felt they could live simply and maintain that mindset while participating in other parts of society. Nearly all of those former Amish now attend one of the more than a dozen Mennonite churches in the county. The sect shares a similar philosophy but is not so strict. Mennonites, for example, can wear regular clothing, drive cars … and play basketball. Generally speaking, the Amish don’t play organized sports because they believe they promote competitiveness and immodesty.
Still, that work ethic and that desire to help one another and play as a team translates well into basketball, and has made its way to the other side of the county as well. When Carrie Molnar talked about why the teams from the 1980s were so good, she kept talking about how everyone knew their role and nobody ever tried to step outside of it.
Mark Lonsinger likes to talk about the fact that the county has no incorporated cities, and virtually no heavy industry. What it does have is independent villages with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses. You have, essentially, people taking care of themselves, until they need to come together. And then they do.
“It’s a really interesting dynamic,” Lonsinger says. “I can’t explain it. We’re not all Amish. We’re from completely different cultures, and yet we find ways, when we need to, to come together and do whatever we need to do.”
Lonsinger thinks that attitude has obviously been passed down, from generation to generation, to today’s basketball players. And that, he says, starts to explain why they’re so successful.
After halftime, the Hiland students pulled off their white T-shirts to reveal black shirts. Now, the whiteout behind the Hawks’ bench has been replaced by a black hole.
Offensively, both teams are able to make a few more shots. This includes one possession where Hannah Clark dribbles past a Hiland defender into the paint and lays a shot off the backboard, almost uncontested, a rare occurrence in the game.
By the end of the third quarter, on the back of Clark who scored 10 in the quarter, West Holmes leads Hiland 29-20.
Lisa Patterson continues to pace to and fro in front of her bench. She’s not loud, at least not while play is ongoing. If she is loud, if she yells at her players during timeouts, it’s drowned out by the fans and the band.
At first, Patterson didn’t want to be the head coach of the Knights. But she’s been in that position for 10 years now. In each of the last four seasons, West Holmes has made it to the Final Four. They’ve been to three championship games and, in 2012-13, the team went 29-0 and won it all.
The last time a team from West Holmes had finished a season unbeaten, Patterson had been a sophomore.
After high school, she went and played basketball at Walsh College. She got a teaching degree and moved back to Holmes County, to Killbuck, where she grew up. She took a job at West Holmes Middle School as an intervention specialist and started coaching middle school volleyball and basketball.
Then the head coach position opened up, and not a lot of people applied. There was too much pressure to be great, it seemed.
“The athletic director at the time sought me out,” Patterson says. “He said, ‘I think you should do this.’ I said ‘No.’”
The athletic director asked three times, and like her coach, Jack Van Reeth, she finally relented.
“I did it because I knew what it felt like to win a state championship,” she says. “I wanted these kids who are so very talented, who are going through here now, I wanted them to experience that. I sat and watched some teams who I felt could have gotten there, and for some reason, there was something missing.”
What was missing, she thought, was that connection to the past.
“I felt like I could make that connection.”
There were other connections, too.
One girl on those early teams of Patterson’s was Lindsy Snyder. She was the daughter of Shane Ridenbaugh, now Shane Snyder, from the first two state championships.
Then came Shane’s other daughter, Laina, and Carrie’s daughter, Emily. They were the core of the team that went 29-0. And the connections didn’t end there. In 2012, Lee Ann Race took over the athletic director position at the school. She played on the championship teams of the 1980s. And the school’s superintendent at the time, Kris Pipes-Perone, was a point guard on all three teams that won state championships.
When Shane Snyder talks about West Holmes basketball, it’s often hard to tell which team she is talking about, her teams or her daughters’ teams. It doesn’t really matter, because the same could be said for both.
“We expected to win,” she says. “That was a lot of pressure. They expected us to win. The drive that class had. They were workhorses. They know what it means to work.”
All of those connections have added up to 221 wins and just 37 losses in Patterson’s coaching career. In fact, the only West Holmes coach who has won more games than Patterson for the school is Van Reeth, with 321.
And while Patterson will say she’s very different from the man who coached her — she says if she coached like Van Reeth, she wouldn’t have a job for long — others aren’t so sure.
“She a good bit reminds me of Jack,” says Coakley, the long-time scorekeeper at West Holmes, who also grew up and lives in Killbuck and knew Lisa when she was just a little girl. “She’s the boss. You can have all the assistants you want, but she’s the boss. And them girls know it. Lisa is a good bit like him.”
Patterson, like Van Reeth, is quiet at first, giving just short answers to questions. But once you get both of them going, they open up. And Coakley, who accompanies Patterson on scouting trips and rides home with her after games just like he did with Van Reeth, says she’s just as friendly as the old coach, but like Jack, you have to get to know her.
Carrie Molnar knew that when Patterson took over, the program was going back to where it had been for so many years.
“It got intense,” she says. “She has expectations, and a plan in her mind. Everyone knew she had been around the program, and we figured she’s gonna wanna keep some tradition.”
One of those traditions was Coakley. He had stopped being the official scorekeeper when Van Reeth left in 1998. But when Patterson took over in 2007, she called him. She wanted Coakley to be her scorekeeper because she saw him as a good luck charm.
He hedged, until Patterson put her foot down.
“John,” she said, “you kept score when I played, and you can keep score when I coach.”
Coakley said OK. He said there was no doubt who was in charge. It was just like the days of Van Reeth.
In Hiland’s previous three games, the team has averaged 79 points per game. They won those games by an average of 60 points. But tonight, nothing is falling. The West Holmes defense is suffocating.
Schlabach stands on the sideline and watches, quietly. He’s changed over the last 25 years. If he has to yell, he’ll do it in the locker room, which he will do loudly and often when this game is over.
In the stands, Molnar continues to dig her fingernails into her cheek.
“The girls are tired,” she says. “The emotions are too much, and the game is just too physical.”
Hiland pulls within five points — 34-29 — with less than three minutes to go, and has the ball. Senior guard Brittany Miller misses an open three-pointer and West Holmes gets the rebound. On the next possession, Hiland misses an open shot but gets an offensive board, only to miss an open put-back. They get the rebound again and miss another open layup. And then again. They shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and can’t get anything to fall, as if the openness, something that was so foreign to this game, has thrown them off.
That series ultimately determined the game. West Holmes made a few free throws near the end and put the game away.
“I can breathe a little bit now,” Molnar says.
The final score: West Holmes 39, Hiland 31. Hiland made just 10 out of its 46 shots on the night.
It’s the lowest scoring game in Schlabach’s 25-year coaching career.
Before Schlabach built his home just northeast of Millersburg about 10 years ago, he first built a gym. He jokes that his wife says he’s just like an Amish man, who builds the barn before the house. The gym is a large brick building back behind the house, which itself is at the back of a long driveway. A separate drive leads to the gym, with enough parking for a dozen or so cars. Inside, there’s a full court, albeit a little shorter than regulation, and high ceilings. The floor is a rubberized surface, not a great as hardwood, but better than the tile on concrete you find in places like church gyms and elementary schools.
This building is almost always unlocked, and if it’s not unlocked, everyone knows where Schlabach hides the key.
Anyone from Hiland (or really anywhere, mostly) can sign in and work out in the gym. It’s a place where teenagers hang out in Holmes County, because, well, there isn’t much else to do.
“When I was growing up,” Schlabach says, “I was always looking for places to play.”
During the summer, anywhere between 50 and 75 kids will sign into the gym and shoot or workout on a given day.
In Gary Smith’s story on Perry Reese, a central theme was the fact that the coach’s door was always open. Players hung out at his house playing cards or video games all the time. It was a way for Reese to build relationships.
For Schlabach, that’s another reason he built the gym. It’s just one more way for him to show his players that he’s there for them. And as if the gym isn’t enough, he’s putting in an in-ground pool right beside it, so in the summer players can cool off after a hard workout.
Often times, he says, after a rough game, he will get home and sit down to figure stats, look out the window into the dark and see the lights pop on in the gym. It doesn’t always happen — Schlabach’s career coaching record is 552-87 — but it does often enough that he is not surprised. And when it does, he’ll look at a clock and see that it is 10:30 or 11 at night. Then he’ll check the video feed from the gym to see who is in there. Invariably, it will be one of his best players.
“When I was a player, the last thing I wanted to do was go home and listen to mom and dad talk about how I played. As a kid, that’s the last thing you want to do.”
The gym, he says, is kind of a sanctuary.
In March 1984, the year West Holmes won its first state title, more than 7,000 people from Holmes County drove over an hour south to Columbus to watch the championship game. Less than 30,000 people lived in the county at the time, which meant just about a quarter of the entire county was in Columbus that night.
Molnar remembers the announcer at that game saying that he hoped the last person out of Holmes County had turned the lights off.
The thing about Holmes County, though, is that the light will always be burning, lit from the successes of years past. There will always be a light on, and it will usually be in a gym, as some girl heads out late at night to shoot baskets.
When Schlabach got home from the game against West Holmes, the light in the gym was already on. His daughter, Kennedy, walked down to the gym and joined three other girls as they shot and shot and shot. They went to work in that gym late at night, because that’s what so many girls in the past have done after a hard game, because that’s the right thing to do, to work harder, to get better, to shoot until you feel like you can’t shoot anymore, and then shoot some more, building something better, all together, after every loss.